What we do
Six capabilities, one goal: your equipment winning work and delivering it profitably. This is the detail — what each service covers, how we do it, and where it earns its keep.
01
A dredging tender is won or lost in the production calculation. Soil conditions, equipment capability, met-ocean windows, disposal distance, fuel burn, crew rotations — each assumption compounds into the unit rate. Get one wrong and you either lose the bid or win a project that loses money. Most equipment owners bid on gut feel; the market leaders bid on calculated production rates with priced risk reserves. That discipline is what we bring.
We prepare the complete submission: production rate calculations for cutter suction dredgers (CSD), trailing suction hopper dredgers (TSHD), and backhoe dredgers; cost models built from your actual fleet economics; method statements that survive engineer scrutiny; and commercial terms that protect you before you sign. Where a bid requires bank guarantees, insurances, or consortium structuring, we manage that too.
Where it earns its keep: a bid priced from calculated production — not gut feel — routinely changes project profitability by more than our entire fee. One disqualified competitor with an incomplete method statement pays for years of retainer.
02
FIDIC is the contract framework behind most international dredging and marine infrastructure work. It allocates risk precisely — unforeseen ground conditions, weather downtime, instructed variations, extensions of time — but only for contractors who know their entitlements and exercise them within the notice periods. Equipment owners who sign FIDIC contracts without managing them typically do the work right and still lose the margin.
We manage the contract from signature to final certificate: contractual correspondence, notices served on time, programme protection, interim payment applications, and the paper trail that decides disputes before they start. We work under FIDIC Blue Book (dredging and reclamation), Red Book, and bespoke forms — and we read the particular conditions before you sign, not after the first dispute.
Where it earns its keep: most dredging margin is not lost on the water — it is lost in unserved notices and unclaimed entitlements. Contract discipline is the cheapest production increase available.
03
Site conditions differ from the soil report. The client instructs extra depth. The disposal area closes for a week. In dredging, variations are not the exception — they are the normal course of a project, and they are where disciplined contractors recover margin that undisciplined ones donate. A differing site conditions claim filed the day the issue is identified, with survey data attached, gets approved. The same claim raised at final account becomes a negotiation you lose.
We identify variation entitlements as they arise, quantify them with production and survey evidence, and file them inside the contractual notice period — every time. Extension of time claims are built on programme records we set up at mobilisation, not reconstructed afterwards. Where a dispute does escalate, you arrive with a contemporaneous paper trail instead of recollections.
Where it earns its keep: on a real Gulf engagement, a differing site conditions claim filed same-day was approved in full — part of why that operator earned three times more than their own gut-feel price would have delivered.
04
Winning the tender is half the job. Delivering the project at the tendered production rate — through weather delays, equipment breakdowns, and client pressure — is the other half, and it is where our founders spent their careers: as superintendents, project managers, and area managers on capital and maintenance dredging works across Europe, the Gulf, and Asia.
We provide senior project management from mobilisation to final handover: mobilisation planning, production monitoring against the tender calculation, cost control that flags overruns in-week rather than at month-end, client and engineer liaison, and completion sign-off. For critical phases we are on site; day-to-day management runs on a reporting structure we set up before the first cubic metre moves. Where the project needs more hands, our specialist network supplies project directors, superintendents, and dredge masters we have personally worked with.
Where it earns its keep: under-performance shows up in weekly production data long before it shows up in the programme. Catching it in week two instead of month three is the difference between a correction and a loss.
05
The right dredger for the job is a soils question, a logistics question, and an economics question at once. We advise on matching fleet to project — CSD versus TSHD versus backhoe, pump distance, hopper capacity, shallow-draft constraints — and on fleet investment decisions: what a vessel is genuinely worth, what it will cost to run, and whether the pipeline justifies it. Our founders have managed the technical maintenance, certification, and new-build design of regional dredging fleets; this is home ground.
Equipment only produces with the right people on it. Through our network we mobilise certified dredge operators and provide crew training programmes when your operators move to a new equipment type — so a newly acquired vessel starts producing in its first week, not its first quarter.
Where it earns its keep: an underutilised dredger is the most expensive asset an owner can hold. Utilisation is the whole game — that is the gap between owning equipment and using it like the market leaders do.
06
The tenders you never hear about are the most expensive ones. Port authorities and awarding bodies buy from their approved vendor lists — and getting onto those lists takes weeks of documentation that cannot be compressed once a tender is already live. The market leaders maintain prequalification continuously, in every geography they care about. Most independent owners do it in a panic, per tender, and miss the deadline.
Inside a retainer relationship we do it the market-leader way: procurement portals monitored weekly with new tenders flagged within 24 hours, vendor registrations kept current with the authorities that matter for your fleet and geography, and a maintained tender library so every new bid starts from the last one instead of from zero. It is unglamorous work, and it is why our partners are already positioned when the right tender appears. This is the heart of the retainer.
Where it earns its keep: a 13-day prequalification sprint once put a CSD operator onto an approved vendor list before a major reclamation tender closed. They won it. Without the PQ, there is no bid at all.
On the other side of the table: for port authorities and project owners we provide independent supervision of dredging contracts, acting as the Engineer under FIDIC. Dredging supervision services →
One email. We will tell you straight where we can add value to your pipeline — and where we can't.
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